SM: There’s this enormous movement under foot that most people don’t know about, but the overarching theme is that we each have a sensual relationship to our natural environment. An innate connection that few would describe as anything close to ‘erotic.’ Do you think we have been conditioned to keep this aspect of eros quiet?

LH: Our connection to sexuality and to our natural environment are intimately interwoven. Eros is life energy, the animating energy that flows through you and me, the energy that flows through all life. As we go through life, however, all too many of us have experiences that implicitly or explicitly shame our connection to the body, to the physical, and to the animal within us. And with it, shame our connection to the Earth, to the natural, and to the wild.

Since our sexuality and our experience of nature are so intimately connected, we are able to approach healing this erotic crisis from either side. For some, embracing their erotic nature, the pleasure of their body, and their sexuality is what opens them up to a greater sense of connection with, and reverence for, the natural world. For others, a deep connection to nature–often, a specific place or ecosystem–is what helps them to embrace their erotic nature, their pleasure and their sexuality. For me, it was the latter. The natural world, and its shameless and abundant expression of sexuality, was the only thing capable of permeating my shame deep enough to open me up to a life where I could embrace my body, my desires and my erotic self as much as I could embrace the intellectual and creative aspects of who I am.

SG: It’s hard for me to relate to sexual repression as a child because I was raised in a very sexually expressive era (the 1960s) by a very sex­positive family, a nudist and polytheistic slash atheist family where we learned about Greek mythologies rather than Biblical ones. My mother taught me all I needed to know about sexuality when I reached puberty. I also was raised before any significant awareness of global warming and other environmental challenges due to the extractive industries that treat lover Earth or Gaia as a victim to pillage, rape, and plunder. I feel sorry for younger people who did not have these privileges, who grew up in more repressive times. I also feel a need for solidarity across generations since life is one.

I do feel that ecosexuality is a movement that brings back nature as a teacher and inspirer in the arts of love. In the era of Romanticism, the French Revolution inspired people to take nature as a teacher in the arts of love. In the 1960s a similar movement was observed. In subsequent decades, there was a shift toward more cautious, artificial, contained and structured ways to express the arts of love. A fear of love prevailed in the culture at large, and the result was that many spontaneous ways to express the arts of love became criminalized. This had the good side effect of producing a whole new generation of educators and initiators in the arts of love that valued a diversity of practices, styles, and talents and therefore empowered a whole bouquet of expressions that were not, before, considered “natural.”

So when we return to the arts of love as part of a practice of ecosexuality, we come to this with an enhanced awareness of how diverse nature is. Of how, in nature itself, sexual expression is mainly a function of pleasure, connectivity, symbiosis, sustainability, diversity, and commonality, and only marginally, as a side effect, a function of reproduction.

Edited with an Introduction by SerenaGaia Anderlini-D’Onofrio and Lindsay Hagamen. Puerto Rico: 3WayKiss through CreateSpace, June 2015. www.ecosexbook.com

Post 3 of 11 in the The EcoSEXual RƎVO˩ution Series, to be continued . . . .

Stay tuned for the juicy details of this interview, when Lindsay and Dr. SerenaGaia answer Sensheant’s salacious and deep probing questions. We will be back on Wednesday next week.

Enchanted with pictures like the one above? Find them in Ecosexuality, Kindle edition, with Photo Gallery, find it here.

We gratefully acknowledge Rebecca Church and her team at Sensheant Magazine. This interview will appear in a forthcoming issue. We send our warm thanks to our interviewer, Cynthia Spence, and congratulate the team on their beautiful and brave initiative. Connect with Sensheant here.